Following OpenIV’s closure, Take-Two has gone after two GTA Online cheat makers

Last week, Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, began sending out Cease and Desist letters to various Grand Theft Auto V modding groups. The first tool to go down was OpenIV, which was unfortunately key to many single-player mods in GTA IV and GTA V. While this is a great loss for the modding community, Take-Two has now turned its attention to GTA Online mods, shutting down two cheat suppliers.

Two Grand Theft Auto Online cheat menus have shut down this week, the first being Force Hax and the second being Menyoo. Both cheat providers made money via a subscription service for regular updates, which is a common business tactic in the online cheating world. Force Hax has removed its social media pages and published an apology on its website, promising to donate earnings to charity upon Take-Two's suggestion.

Menyoo's website also has an apology listed in place of all previous content. Menyoo will also be donating earnings to charity, though it is waiting on Take-Two to choose one first.

While the removal of GTA Online cheats is generally a good thing for the future of the game, GTA V players are still feeling burned by the shutdown of OpenIV. Last week, GTA V's Steam page began getting flooded with negative reviews and that hasn't stopped at all over the weekend. The game now has an ‘overwhelmingly negative' recent rating, with over 86,000 negative reviews. The game's overall rating has also been bumped down from positive to mixed.

Speaking of OpenIV, Rockstar has issued a statement of its own regarding recent events: “Take-Two's actions were not specifically targeting single player mods. Unfortunately OpenIV enables recent malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody. We are working to figure out how we can continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.”

So hopefully Rockstar can come up with something that can keep everyone happy. We'll be keeping an eye out for more news on that front.

KitGuru Says: Grand Theft Auto Online does have a cheating problem. However, the timing here is pretty bad. If these shutdowns had happened before word got out about OpenIV, it may have softened the blow.

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